Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees
When this one-off documentary was announced, some predictably invoked Alan Partridge’s hapless pitch of Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine many other celebrities managing to get this made, and even harder to imagine any who could have made it so watchable. A look of astonished delight is plastered over Dame Judi’s face throughout the hour, as she makes all manner of unexpected discoveries about the trees that she loves. There is also a rare peek into her personal life and relationship with her “chap”, David Mills.
This may lack the forensic camerawork and high-spec CGI of most BBC nature documentaries, but there are rewarding revelations amid the occasional dose of Botany 101. “I think of my trees as part of my extended family,” says Dench – not the absurd piece of sentimentality that you might suspect, as she plants a tree in her back garden for each friend or relative who has died. And trees, it transpires, are also remarkably sociable in their way, an arboreal community connected by spidery threads of fungus and able to call for help if under attack by aphids. Charming and subtly educational. Gabriel Tate